The birth of the web | CERN The birth of the web This content is archived on the CERN Document Server Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world. The first website at CERN - and in the world - was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. The NeXT machine - the original web server - is still at CERN. As part of the project to restore the first website , in 2013 CERN reinstated the world's first website to its original address. On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. CERN made the next release available with an open licence, as a more sure way to maximise its dissemination.

Through these actions, making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish. History of the Web – World Wide Web Foundation Image: © CERN Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist. He was born in London, and his parents were early computer scientists, working on one of the earliest computers. Growing up, Sir Tim was interested in trains and had a model railway in his bedroom. He recalls : “I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. Then I ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made a computer out of an old television set.” After graduating from Oxford University, Berners-Lee became a software engineer at CERN , the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists come from all over the world to use its accelerators, but Sir Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing information. “In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer.

Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…”, Tim says . Tim thought he saw a way to solve this problem – one that he could see could also have much broader applications. Already, millions of computers were being connected together through the fast-developing Internet and Berners-Lee realised they could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext. In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the Web in a document called “ Information Management: A Proposal ”. Believe it or not, Tim’s initial proposal was not immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time, Mike Sendall , noted the words “Vague but exciting” on the cover. The Web was never an official CERN project, but Mike managed to give Tim time to work on it in September 1990. He began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve Jobs’ early products. Tim’s original proposal. Image: CERN By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s Web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your Web browser): HTML: HyperText Markup Language.

The markup (formatting) language for the Web. URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and used to identify to each resource on the Web. It is also commonly called a URL. HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the Web. Tim also wrote the first Web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) and the first Web server (“httpd“). By the end of 1990, the first Web page was served on the open internet, and in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new Web community. As the Web began to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission. He explains : “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.” So, Tim and others advocated to ensure that CERN would agree to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, for ever.

This decision was announced in April 1993 , and sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation never seen before. In 2003, the companies developing new Web standards committed to a Royalty Free Policy for their work. In 2014, the year we celebrated the Web’s 25th birthday , almost two in five people around the world were using it. Tim moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community devoted to developing open Web standards . He remains the Director of W3C to this day. The early Web community produced some revolutionary ideas that are now spreading far beyond the technology sector: Decentralisation: No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the Web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure … and no “kill switch”! This also implies freedom from indiscriminate censorship and surveillance. Non-discrimination: If I pay to connect to the internet with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both communicate at the same level.

This principle of equity is also known as Net Neutrality. Bottom-up design: Instead of code being written and controlled by a small group of experts, it was developed in full view of everyone, encouraging maximum participation and experimentation. Universality: For anyone to be able to publish anything on the Web, all the computers involved have to speak the same languages to each other, no matter what different hardware people are using; where they live; or what cultural and political beliefs they have. In this way, the Web breaks down silos while still allowing diversity to flourish. Consensus: For universal standards to work, everyone had to agree to use them. Tim and others achieved this consensus by giving everyone a say in creating the standards, through a transparent, participatory process at W3C. New permutations of these ideas are giving rise to exciting new approaches in fields as diverse as information (Open Data), politics (Open Government), scientific research (Open Access), education, and culture (Free Culture). But to date we have only scratched the surface of how these principles could change society and politics for the better. In 2009, Sir Tim established the World Wide Web Foundation.

The Web Foundation is advancing the Open Web as a means to build a just and thriving society by connecting everyone, raising voices and enhancing participation. Please do explore our site and our work . We hope you’ll be inspired by our vision and decide to take action. Remember, as Tim tweeted during the Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2012, “This is for Everyone” . The World’s First Web Site Introduction On August 6, 1991, without fanfare, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website while working at CERN, the huge particle physics lab in Switzerland. The son of computer scientists, Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955 (the same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates) and studied physics at Oxford. While employed at CERN in the 1980s, Berners-Lee observed how tough it was to keep track of the projects and computer systems of the organization’s thousands of researchers, who were spread around the globe. As he later stated: “In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it.

Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer.” This computer was used at CERN by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee to devise the World Wide Web (WWW). (Credit: SSPL/Getty Images) In March 1989, Berners-Lee gave managers at CERN a proposal for an information management system that used hypertext to link documents on different computers that were connected to the Internet. (Hypertext, a term coined in 1963, allows a person to get a document or piece of content by clicking on a coded word or phrase.) Labelled “vague but exciting” by his boss, the proposal at first wasn’t accepted. Berners-Lee teamed up with Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer at CERN, to refine the proposal, and in 1990 the Englishman’s boss gave him time to work on the project. After originally calling the project Information Management, Berners-Lee tried out names such as Mine of Information and Information Mesh before settling on WorldWideWeb.

By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee, using a Steve Jobs-designed NeXT computer, had developed the key technologies that are the bedrock of the Web, including Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), for creating Web pages; Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a set of rules for transferring data across the Web; and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), or Web addresses for finding a document or page. He also had devised a basic browser and Web server software. The beginning of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet arrived on August 6, 1991, when Berners-Lee published the first-ever website. Fittingly, the site was about the World Wide Web project, describing the Web and how to use it. Hosted at CERN on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, the site’s URL was Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the Web, poses in front of the first World Wide Web Server. (Credit: SEBASTIAN DERUNGS/AFP/Getty Images) Berners-Lee didn’t try to cash in on his invention and rejected CERN’s call to patent his Web technology.

He wanted the Web to be open and free so it could expand and evolve as rapidly as possible. As he later said, “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.” In 1993, a team at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to become popular with the general public. The next few years saw the launch of such websites as Yahoo (1994), Amazon (1995), eBay (1995) and Google (1998). By the time Facebook debuted in 2004, there were more than 51 million websites, according to Internet Live Stats . Meanwhile, in 1994, Berners-Lee left CERN for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that maintains standards for the Web.

The low-profile visionary went on to be named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, and in 2004 was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2009, Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web Foundation, an organization focused on ensuring the Web benefits humanity. During the opening ceremony at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, he was honored for inventing the Web and tweeted, “This is for everyone.” Article Details: The World’s First Web Site Author The World’s First Web Site URL BBC - History - Tim Berners Lee z Tim Berners Lee, at the Rayburn building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, 13 June 2001. © Berners Lee is a British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. Timothy John Berners Lee was born on 8 June 1955 and grew up in London. He studied physics at Oxford University and became a software engineer.

In 1980, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, he first described the concept of a global system, based on the concept of 'hypertext', that would allow researchers anywhere to share information. He also built a prototype called 'Enquire'. In 1984, Berners Lee's returned to CERN, which was also home to a major European Internet node. In 1989, Berners Lee published a paper called 'Information Management: A Proposal' in which he married up hypertext with the Internet, to create a system for sharing and distributing information not just within a company, but globally. He named it the World Wide Web. He also created the first web browser and editor. The world's first website, was launched on 6 August 1991. It explained the World Wide Web concept and gave users an introduction to getting started with their own websites. In 1994, Berners Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. He has served as director of the consortium since then.

He also works as a senior research scientist at LCS which has now become the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Tim Berners-Lee, computer scientist - Stock Image H402/0524 - Science Photo Library Tim Berners-Lee, computer scientist Credit: CERN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Restrictions: Editorial use only. This image may not be used to state or imply endorsement by CERN of any product, activity or service Caption: Sir Tim Berners-Lee (b.1955), British computer scientist and principal developer of the world wide web (WWW). Berners-Lee studied at Oxford University. After working in industry he moved to CERN (the European particle physics laboratory) near Geneva, Switzerland. There he developed the web, a global network for information sharing based on hypertext documents. These are text documents that have other data, such as images or links to other computers, embedded in them. This work started in 1989 and continued throughout the early 1990s. Berners-Lee left CERN in 1994, and in 2001 joined MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), USA.

He was awarded a knighthood in the 2004 New Year's Honours. Release details: Model release not available. Property release not required. How the World Wide Web developed - BT How the World Wide Web developed It seems such a modern invention but the World Wide Web can trace its foundation back to before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Let's browse the events and milestones that helped weave the web. Print this story 1989 March 12: Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN in Switzerland, submits a proposal for a "distributed information system" to allow researchers to deal with huge amounts of information generated by complex physics experiments. This is the genesis of the World Wide Web - spelt as three words. 1990 December 20: The world's first website goes live at Info.cern.ch . Check it out here . 1991 August 6: The world wide web is launched publicly as Berners-Lee publishes details of the project on the internet. March: Pipex introduces dial-up internet connection to the UK 1993 April 30: Cern releases the World Wide Web source code and announces it will be available free of charge.

It also releases a basic browser along with a library of code. By the end of the year there are more than 500 web servers, and the web accounts for 1% of internet traffic. 1994 May 25 - 27: First International World-Wide Web conference, held at CERN. It is hailed as the "Woodstock of the web". December: By the end of the year there are 10,000 servers, 2,000 of them commercial. There are 10 million users, with traffic, according to CERN, equivalent to shipping the collected works of Shakespeare every second. 1995 July 16: Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com as an online bookshop from computers in his garage in Seattle, Washington. It is now the world's largest online retailer. August 16: Microsoft launches first version of its Internet Explorer web browser, which would come to dominate the market as part of its Windows platform. 1997 September 15: Google.com is registered as a web domain by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Today Google Inc is the second largest company in the United States, with a market value of around 395 billion dollars £236 billion), only surpassed by Apple (465 billion dollars £278 billion). 2000 January: The DotCom Boom reaches its peak. The previous few years had seen a rush to invest in online firms, from retail to internet service providers (ISPs). Share prices soared. It culminated in ISP AOL buying traditional media company Time Warner for almost $200 billion. March: DotCom Crash - the bubble bursts because few of the firms that were invested in made any money. Investors lose millions. By October 2002, exacerbated by the effect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the technology-focused Nasdaq stock index had fallen by 78%. 2004 February: Harvard psychology student Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook with his college roommates to connect students at the university. It was rolled out to the general public in 2006 and as of January 2014 it has about 1.2 billion monthly users. It floated on the Nasdaq stock exchange in October.

2005 November: A new video-hosting website called YouTube is launched. Taking advantage of increasing internet connection speeds it allows users to upload their own under-generated content. Today, according to the company, a billion people watch more than six billion hours of video in 61 languages every month, and 100 hours of footage is uploaded every minute. 2006 March: Twitter Inc is created by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass as "a text message service that allowed users to quickly communicate with a small group". The first tweet is sent by @Jack on March 21. Today it is a social media giant with almost 650 million active users around the world. 2007 January 9: Apple launch the iPhone. It revolutionises mobile web-surfing with a handset that features a large touchscreen and a mobile-friendly version of its Safari web browser, and spawns the world of apps. July 10: Apple launches the App Store. BRITISH INVENTIONS that changed the world. that changed the world British inventions in communication, energy and health that changed the world.

The world wide web (aka WWW, W3, Web) was invented by British computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee developed the Web in 1989 while working for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The Web is a system that uses the Internet to link to and access information (text, images, and multimedia) by using a web browser. These links are known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http). The Web was invented to allow researchers to collaborate with each other and to share their information on projects. In 1990, Berners-Lee created the first web server (info.cern.ch), the first web page (info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html), and the first web browser (NeXT). In 1994, Berners-Lee created a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , to create standards for the Web and to ensure that his invention would be patent-free and royalty-free technology that anyone could use. Berniers-Lee has received numerous honors for his work. He received a knighthood from the Queen of England and an election to the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Time Magazine identified Berners-Lee as among the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century. Penicillin Bacteria uses antibiotics to protect themselves against organisms that threaten their survival. Penicillin is the name attributed to the antibiotic created by the penicillium bacterium. British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming noticed that a culture of Staphylococcus (a bacteria that can cause severe infections in humans) was being dissolved by a contamination of blue-green mold. Fleming discovered that the mold produced an antibiotic that killed numerous bacteria harmful to humans, which he named penicillin. However, it wasn't until the 1940s that penicillin's chemical composition was isolated and developed into a therapeutic medicine by British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain, and Australian pharmacologist and pathologist, Howard Florey. In 1945, Fleming, Florey and Chain were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Electric Motor Michael Faraday, a self-taught physicist and creator of many British inventions , invented the electric motor from his discovery of electromagnetic induction.

Faraday studied the published works of various physicists (Danish physicist, Hans Ørsted; French physicist, André-Marie Ampère; German physicist, Johann Schweigger) and their experiments on how electric current created magnetic fields. Faraday concluded that electric current and magnetic fields were not separate phenomena but rather just different perceptions of the same thing. In 1831, he invented an electromagnetic induction ring, which was a rotating disc between poles in a horseshoe magnet attached to wires. When the disc rotated it created a magnetic effect that produced a flow of electrical current through the wires. This British invention became known as the electric motor. Photo credit: Miqueias Tim Berners-Lee Tim Berners-Lee Biography Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He founded and Directs the World Wide Consortium (W3C) the forum for technical development of the Web. He founded the Web Foundation whose mission is that the WWW serves Humanity, and co-founded the Open Data Institute in London. His research group at MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab ("CSAIL") plans to re-decentralize the Web. Tim spends a lot of time fighting for rights such as privacy, freedom and openness of the Web.

A graduate of Oxford University, Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web while at CERN , the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread. He is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence ( CSAIL ) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) where he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) . He is also a Professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK. Tim is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C ), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.

In 2011 he was named to the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation , a globally oriented private foundation with the mission of advancing human welfare. He has promoted open government data globally and is a member of the UK's Transparency Board. He is President of London's Open Data Institute . In 2001 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany's Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. In 2009 he was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of " Weaving the Web ".

On March 18 2013, Tim, along with Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreesen, was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for "ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity." Before you mail me If you need someone to find something for you about some arbitrary subject (travel agents, or parakeets or whatever), don't ask me, but try the Virtual Library for example, or your favorite search engine. If you want to know how to run a server, or how to edit HTML, check the W3C web or your local bookstore. I'm sorry I can't answer individual requests for help. If you can't access something on , you find bad links from pages, or errors in the hypertext please see the webmaster's documentation .. If you are doing homework or a school project on the history of the Web then please check my Kid's questions , or the more general Frequently Asked Questions ; and also, W3C FAQ , or my press FAQ as almost everything I have is there or linked from this page. I am sorry I cannot help with individual projects.

If you are a member of the press and need clarification or an interview, please mail w3t-pr@w3.org (and Cc me) with details. If it is about a possible speaking engagement, see below . If you have a serious comment on things I have signed, then do email me. I am also always open to discussion with W3C Advisory Committee representatives. What not to email Email is safe unless it contains programs. (Data and documents are fine, programs are not). If you send me a program, I will not run it, as it could damage my system and could be a virus. Note: Documents for Microsoft word, Excel, and possibly other Office programs tend to execute programs (scripts) in what you would expect to be harmless documents. These can expose my machine to viruses, because these programs do not (it seems) prevent scripts from running within a document when it received by email. Please do not send me Microsoft Office documents. If you are sending text, please send it as plain text, HTML, of necessary PDF. If you use your favorite word process, slide tool, etc, and send it in that program's format, then you are forcing me install proprietary software on whatever machine I read them on.

What you can email These are all good document standards: Plain text messages, HTML (sometimes called rich text) pages without scripts, Photos (JPEG files, PNG, GIF and SVG), PDF, SMIL, RDF/XML, N3 and so on. All these can be sent as messages or as attachments to messages. I can read them with a variety of software programs, and they cannot contain viruses, unless there is a serious bug in the code I use to read them. If you don't need anything else, then use plain text. These are good rules when emailing anyone. Please use my full name in the "To" line with my email address, as this will make your message look less like spam. This will happen automatically if you have me in your address book. If you just type in my email address, I probably won't see your mail. Tim Berners-Lee I nternet Pioneers Tim Berners-Lee The World Wide Web (WWW) is so ubiquitous that it seems strange to think that it has only been around for a few years.

Indeed, use of the WWW became widespread in the mid 1990's, but its beginnings can actually be traced back to 1980 when Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman who had recently graduated from Oxford, landed a temporary contract job as a software consultant at CERN ( the famous European Particle physics Laboratory in Geneva). He wrote a program, called Enquire, which he called a "memory substitute," for his personal use to help him remember connections between various people and projects at the lab ( Wright, 64 ). This was a very helpful tool since CERN was (and still is) a large international organization involving a multitude of researchers located around the world. Berners-Lee finished his work at CERN and left, but he returned in 1984 with a more permanent position. His previous work with Enquire had left a mental mark. He envisioned a global information space where information stored on computers everywhere was linked and available to anyone anywhere. There were two technologies already developed that would allow his vision to become reality. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article entitled, " As We May Thin k," in which he described a theoretical system for storing information based on associations.

Others like Ted Nelson and Douglas Englebar t had furthered Bush's work with their own work on hypertext. Hypertext allows documents to be published in a nonlinear format. Hypertext links allow the reader to jump instantly from one electronic document to another. Berners-Lee had already used this format when he wrote Enquire. The other technology was the Interneta computer network of networks. The Internet is a very general infrastructure that allows computers to link together . It uses standardized protocols (TCP/IP) which let computers of different types using different software communicate. Hypertext would allow any document in the information space to be linked to any other document. The Internet would allow those documents to be transmitted. At CERN if researchers wanted to share documents they had to organize and format them so that they would be compatible with the main CERN computing system. This was a problem since the researchers contributing to the work going on at CERN were located around the world and used many different kinds of computers and software. Many researchers were upset and sometimes unwilling to expend the extra effort to make their work conform to the CERN system.

Berners-Lee thought, " it would be so much easier if everybody asking me questions all the time could just read my database, and it would be so much nicer if I could find out what these guys are doing by jumping into a similar database of information for them" ( Wright, 66 ). He decided that a simple system with simple rules that would be acceptable to all was needed. The new system would need to be easy and decentralized so that anyone anywhere could share informationwithout having to go to a centralized authority. In 1989, Berners-Lee submitted a proposal at CERN to develop an information system that would create a web of information. Initially, his proposal received no reply, but he began working on his idea anyway. In 1990, he wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)the language computers would use to communicate hypertext documents over the Internet and designed a scheme to give documents addresses on the Internet. Berners-Lee called this address a Universal Resource Identifier (URI). (This is now usually known as a URLUniform Resource Loc ator.) By the end of the year he had also written a client program (browser) to retrieve and view hypertext documents.

He called this client "WorldWideWeb." Hypertext pages were formatted using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that Berners-Lee had written. He also wrote the first web server. A web server is the software that stores web pages on a computer and makes them available to be accessed by others. Berners-Lee set up the first web server known as "info.cern.ch." at CERN. Berners-Lee tried to sell his new creation at CERN as a way to link data between the many incompatible systems at CERN. Still the bureaucracy at CERN was slow in acknowledging his efforts. Berners-Lee then turned to the Internet community. In 1991, he made his WorldWideWeb browser and web server software available on the Internet and posted notices to several newsgroups including alt.hypertext. The Web began to take off as computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own web servers. Often the owners of the new sites would email Berners-Lee and he would link to their sites from the CERN site. His dream of a global information space was finally happening. As the number of users on the Web grew it became more attractive as a medium.

Scientists, who were already used to sharing information on the Internet began to embrace the Web. It was easier to post information on the Web once than reply repeatedly to multiple requests for the same data. They also no longer had to worry whether or not the other scientists used a different operating system. Government agencies who had responsibilities to make their information public also began turning toward the Web. As more people began using the Web the need for more point-and-click browsers became evident. Berners-Lee had developed his WorldWideWeb browser on a very specialized personal computer called a NeXT. What was needed now was browser that Mac, PC, and Unix users could use. This need was soon met as others, mostly students, began creating new browsers. For instance, Students at the Helsinki University of Technology wrote Erwisea browser for Unix machines, and Pei Wei, a U.C. Berkeley student wrote Viola. Colleagues of Berners-Lee at CERN wrote a browser for Mac machines called Samba. Marc Andreesen , a student at the University of Illinois, with the help of fellow students, created the Mosaic browser.

Growth of the Web and Potential Problems New browsers and the increasing amount of information that could be found on t he Web made it an ever more attractive medium. It grew exponentially, both in the number of sites and users. The number of visitors to the info.cern.ch server was growing by a factor of ten every year. By the summer of 1993, the site was getting ten thousand hits a day ( Berners-Lee, 75) . Berners-Lee was predictably happy about the growth of his brainchild, but various groups seemed to be going in opposite directions. He feared that the Web would splinter into various factionsacademic, commercial, free, etc. Berners-Lee was concerned over some of the new directions the Web was taking. There were decided differences between his original vision and the visions of Andreesen and the Netscape crowd. The Web was designed to be a serious medium. Berners-Lee feared that this new visuallyappealing Web was becoming frivolous. Berners-Lee and other HTML purists were alarmed by all the new tags created by Netscape.

Andreesen remembers, " Tim bawled me out in the summer of '93 for adding images to the thing," ( Reid, 12 ). World Wide Web Consortium Bern ers-Lee was also concerned that the new success of the Web would lead to destructive competition that would create proprietary Web products that could destroy the open nature of the Web. He knew that some sort of oversight was needed to keep the Web running smoothly, but any new oversight organization could also not be allowed to fundamentally alter the free and open character of the Web. He envisioned a forum where developers of servers and browsers could reach a consensus on how the Web should operate. On May 24, 1994, the first WWW conference was held at CERN. Berners-Lee used this conference to share his vision to create a consortium to help the Web develop smoothly: "The conference was the way to tell everyone that no one should control it, and that a consortium could help parties agree an how to work together while also actually withstanding any effort by any institution or company to 'control' things." ( Berners-Lee, 80 ). Berners-Lee also discussed the idea of a consortium with some his friends at MIT.

In July of 1994 he received a phone call from one of those friends. MIT agreed to host the consortium. MIT would be the American headquarters and CERN would be the European headquarters. (CERN would later decide to drop out of the consortium and France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control became the European headquarters). Berners-Lee moved almost immediately to MIT to head the new consortium, which was known as the World Wide Web consortium or simply W3C. The purpose of the new consortium was to " 'lead the Web to its full potential,' primarily by developing common protocols to enhance the interoperability and evolution of the Web." ( Berners-Lee, 94 ). Membership in the consortium would be open to any organization: commercial, governmental, educational, etc. Any member would be free to participate in any meeting or working group put together by the consortium. The W3C develops open technical specifications that can be used for free by anyone. These specifications are reached by a very democratic process. Any member can suggest a new project. If there is sufficient support within the consortium the project proceeds. When it is finished it is released by the consortium as a "recommendation." The W3C does not enforce its recommendations.

It simply encourages everyone to adopt them. Sir Tim Berners-Lee – World Wide Web Foundation " Sir Tim Berners-Lee " by Paul Clarke - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons . Web Inventor and Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation The inventor of the world wide web and one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century’, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a scientist and academic whose visionary and innovative work has transformed almost every aspect of our lives. Having invented the Web in 1989 while working at CERN and subsequently working to ensure it was made freely available to all, Berners-Lee is now dedicated to enhancing and protecting the web’s future. He is a Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, which seeks to ensure the web serves humanity by establishing it as a global public good and a basic right. He is also Director of the World Wide Web Consortium , a global web standards organization he founded in 1994 to lead the web to its full potential. In 2012 he co-founded the Open Data Institute (ODI) which advocates for Open Data in the UK and globally.

Sir Tim has advised a number of governments and corporations on ongoing digital strategies. A graduate of Oxford University, Sir Tim presently holds academic posts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab), (USA) and the University of Southampton (UK.) Sir Tim has received multiple accolades in recent years. These include receiving the first Queen’ Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2013, election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and being knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth in 2004. He has received over 10 honorary doctorates, is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and was awarded the Finland Millennium Prize in 2004. In 2007, Berners-Lee was awarded the UK’s Order of Merit – a personal gift of the monarch limited to just 24 living recipients. In 2012, he played a starring role in the opening ceremony for the Olympics, where, in front of an audience of some 900 million, he tweeted : “This is for everyone”.

Question: Which British scientist, working at CERN in 1994, developed and launched the World Wide Web?
Answer: Tim Berners-Lee